The Meeting with Other Cultures

The Meeting with Other Cultures

Through their early conquests, the Muslims came in contact with other peoples and cultures, which proved of major importance for the development of the new Islamic culture.

The Byzantine Empire was the powerful heir to the Roman Empire. Its Christian emperors ruled from Constantinople (today Istanbul) over the many different provinces around the Mediterranean Sea with the aid of a well-developed state administration. Constantinople was also the center for the large-scale production of works of art for the court and state church. The artistic traditions that were created in Constantinople spread throughout the empire, even reaching distant provinces like Coptic Egypt. The often very finely designed and costly works of art made for the Byzantine elite and church became an ideal for the new Islamic rulers. Byzantine art’s motifs and decorative principles were adopted but also transformed, since Islam prohibited the use of figurative elements in a religious context. Byzantine art and culture, in turn, were influenced by Islam. This interchange continued right to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.

The Sasanian Empire had emerged in 224 as yet another in the series of great cultures in the area covered by Iran and Iraq. The Sasanian kings battled the Byzantine Empire for dominance in the Middle East. According to their state religion, Zoroastrianism, the king had received his power from God in the battle against Evil. The victorious king was a favorite motif on work in silver, which like Sasanian silks and facet-cut glass was renowned far and wide. The old capital of Ctesiphon had grandiose, monumental buildings that were decorated inside and out with stucco in geometric and figurative patterns. Arab sources give admiring descriptions of the city’s wealth.

The first Muslim troops in Central Asia encountered great cultural diversity. There were still traces of the Hellenistic culture that had followed in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the 4th century B.C. In the ensuing period, the network of caravan routes that connected China and India with the eastern Mediterranean had brought many people and goods through the mountainous region. Many different religions were practiced in Central Asia, where Muslims came in contact with Buddhism and its rich imagery.

Two fragments of murals on clay mixed with straw

These two fragments come from the largest mountain cave in Kizil that German archeologists excavated on the Silk Road in the years preceding the First World War.

The heads resemble those of a Sasanian king and a Buddha, and stylistically, there is in fact a great variety of sources for art in the region. There are Western features, showing Hellenistic, Sasanian, Nestorian, and Manichaean influences, and Eastern, with Buddhist and Chinese inspiration.

Early Central Asian painting later exerted an influence on Persian-Islamic imagery and what can broadly be called Islamic miniature painting.